Key Ideas Behind Group Projects

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Key Ideas Behind Group Projects

• Resources for reform science teaching
• Peer review and collective validation
• Environmental literacy as a goal of science
  education

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Why dont more teachers just do reform science
teaching?
3
Resources Necessary for Reform Science Teaching

• Teaching materials
• Experiences, patterns, and explanations
• Engaging students in inquiry and application
• Assessing students motivation and understanding
• Personal knowledge of science, students, teaching
  strategies
• Social support system Other teachers working
  with you to do the same thing

4
Finding or Creating Good Resources

• Helping one another through peer review
• Creating standards
• Continuing to improve
• Resources
• Standards
• Community of professionals

5
How Are Scientific Journals Different from the
Internet?

• They are products of a specific community with
  shared purposes and standards.
• They use peer review to
• Select the contributions that meet the
  communitys standards and help to achieve its
  purposes.
• Improve the contributions before they are widely
  shared.

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Qualities of a Good Peer Review Process

• Constructive criticism Identifying parts that
  are more and less useful, or that fall short of
  standards.
• Suggestions for improvement Helping the author
  find ways to improve.
• Author response Improving manuscript so that it
  is better than the original draft.

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Goals for Group Projects

• Make the projects more like journals than the
  Internet (useful for our shared purposes and
  standards rather than collections of everything)
• Move from instructor review toward peer review
• Move from instructor standards to shared standards

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Activities for March 16

• Group discussion of one example
• Review the work you have done so far within your
  group.
• Constructive criticism based on standards and
  general usefulness
• Suggestions for improvement
• General question and answer.
• Deciding on criteria for good peer review.

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Environmental Literacy

• What is the most important thing that science
  education can do?
• Prepare students to be citizens
• What are the most important science-related
  issues that people who are students now will be
  facing in their lifetimes?

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Definition of Environmental Literacy

• Environmental literacy is the capacity to
  understand evidence-based arguments concerning
  the interactions among human populations,
  technologies, and ecosystems and to participate
  knowledgeably in decisions based on those
  arguments. Implicit in this definition is the
  idea that environmental literacy involves
  evidence-based reasoning about human actions and
  their environmental effects.

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One Example Global Warming
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What Should Responsible Citizens Be Able to Do
with this Graph?

• Understand what it shows
• Connect it to personal experience
• Connect it to implications for our collective
  future
• Ask questions about data, patterns, explanations
• How did they get the data?
• What do the error bars mean?
• Is this a real pattern or random variation?
• What are the possible causes?
• Make judgments and act on them

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Environmental Literacy Topics (Additional Support)

• Metabolism Energy and Growth
• Evolution by Natural Selection
• Biogeochemistry of Ecosystems
• Population Dynamics in Ecosystems
• Global Environmental Changes
• Matter and Energy Energy Conservation and
  Transformations
• Kinetic Molecular Theory and Physical Changes in
  Matter

• Chemical Bonds and Compounds
• Chemical Changes in Matter Types of Reactions
• Movement of Surface and Ground Water
• Oceans and Oceanography
• Precipitation and the Water Cycle
• Regional and Global Climate Patterns

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Parts of Group Projects

• Topic content and standards
• Curriculum materials analysis
• Web resources
• Inquiry and learning cycles
• Assessment resources (for understanding students
  and for grading)
• Presentation to class

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Steps in Developing Each Part

• 1. First draft. Some member(s) of your group
  will use this Word template to create a first
  draft of the section.
• Peer review. Other group members and an
  instructor will review the first draft and
  suggest improvements.
• Revision and putting on web. Revise the section
  in the Word document, then, with help from
  Dipendra, put the section on the course website.
• 4. Presentation and discussion. All the groups
  will present and discuss what they have learned
  on April 29.